The proposal

1. IDEAS IN WEARABLES
A PROPOSAL CONSISTING OF VARIOUS IDEAS IN WEARABLES AND APPROACH TO
IMPLEMENT THEM.
Mani&Devyani
4/12/2013

2. I
WEARABLE AUDIO DIARY
The idea is to create a device which will help in recording self-talk sessions and introspect on our own thought process. When in doubt, when you want to
make sense out of things, when we want to gain clarity, often we introspect-penning our thoughts or talking to ourselves.
It happens as we walk or as we travel in public transport or when we are alone in a room or at times even in unexpected places such as lazing in a restroom.
These verbally expressed thoughts are tough to remember after sometime. Also they are part of one’s personal thoughts, which he/she cannot or do not want
to share with anyone else. Capturing these thoughts could lead us in understanding our thoughts. It makes us self-aware and at times it may even help us get
a better perspective of the problem or situation in hand. What if, if we could have all our personal verbal thoughts, maintained in a dairy, which is wearable
and easily accessible?
All these self-awareness efforts may lead to empathising with one self. It may help people be more self-aware of their thoughts.
Knowing yourself  Being self-aware  Better decision making  Better Living
To understand the need of it, we should examine a few chosen scenarios.
1. Emily is a thoughtful bright young woman. She is working on her college project and is confused on some points. To gain some perspective, she scribbles
her thoughts on a piece of paper. As her thought flow surpasses the speed at which she could scribble, she abandons the paper and starts to talk to herself.
Her twenty minute long self-talk session helped her understand all her options and come up with key insights which could be shared with her team
members for the benefit of the project. After the self-talk session, she returns to the abandoned paper and tries to jot down the main points, but she is not
able to remember them clearly.
2. John and Susan had a terrible argument; chances are very high they will break up. John is pretty upset and drunk and starts talking to himself about what
happened between him and Susan. He rambles his perspective of the whole incident to himself sitting on his couch and at the end of it he falls asleep. There
are very high chances that when he wakes up, he will not remember much of what he thought of Susan. The break up could have stopped if he had a record of
his verbal thoughts, so that he could go back and analyse once more.

3. 3. Mike is a young artist who often involves himself in self-talking sessions during his daily commute, to gain more clarity on his thoughts and make sense of
world around him. He sometimes uses his phone record to record his verbal thoughts, but that is not very comfortable to do every time. He wants to
document his verbal thoughts as a diary, but is unable to do because he does not want to get into a hassle of taking out a voice recorder, connecting it to the
pc to organise and store.
4. Mani is a creative person who gets interesting ideas all the time, every time it is difficult for him to jot them into a diary. He gets interesting dreams, and
wakes up in a middle of the night. By the time, he tries to reach his diary, which might be in the next room; a lot of his details of the dreams have vanished. A
lot of ideas have never been noted down because there is no resource nearby to record. An idea which will take 30 seconds to describe verbally, will take
10minutes if he want to jot down in a sketchbook.
Some of our ideas for the form.
Let’s understand the key functions of this diary:
1. Records and saves all your self-talk sessions, needs to be switched on to start this function
2. It is something which is ideally on the person for most part of the day in a natural way.
3. Automatically syncs with your smartphone, as soon as recording is done, so that you can listen to it as an audio clip later.
4. Properly organised files in the mobile app in a nice and clean interface categorised according to their dates, or time schedules or mind mapping
words.
Extensions:
1. Mobile app could be a sort of personal/semi-public blog.
2. The app could be connected social networking sites to find like-minded people around the world, based on your mind maps of your thoughts.
3. It could be connected to cloud storage to drag out work related self-talking sessions.
4. Could be used as personal messages and send it as an audio device.

4. II
TIMING YOUR CONVERSATIONS
Deriving from Quantified Self and Mindfulness theory, we have developed an idea of wearable device which taps all our conversations throughout the day
and create a file which tells us the time consumed in the each conversation, a mood map and the name of the person. It makes us more self-aware of our
conversation pattern and our moods with different people. We can track our conversations and become self- aware of our conversation leading to better
communication skills over a period of time. The idea is to make the person aware of his conversations and mood swings in one day’s time.
What does it do?
1. It will record all the conversations throughout the day.
2. Associate various colours with each conversation which will be symbolic of the mood of the talk.
3. Recording the time length of the conversation, with whom the conversation is happening and what time of the day.
4. Automatically syncs and organises them each labelled to the time of the day, date, persons involved in conversations and mood associated with them.
Mainly it gives you an idea of how much time do you give to your conversations, what way you talk to whom, how does conversations impact your mood.
What is your conversational personality? Adds to the already existing behavioural theories about oneself, recognition of a pattern and becoming more aware
of you.
What will be this device?
Why limiting the wearable devices to arm bands and other regularly used accessories?
Why can’t they be in accessories in themselves? A silicon wearable tech tattoo that is flesh in colour and sticks to your chest underneath the shirt, or on your
neck. As conversation tapping device. Various tattoo of these kinds, each a different device. You can customise it according to your needs, can program some
modifications via software made available with the device or on the web.
Alternatively, as a starting point, this could be in various life style accessories like single-person umbrellas, hoods, and hairclips or as collar clips etc.

5. III
TALKING APPARELS: FUN TECH
The idea is introduce an element of fun and naughtiness via apparels in our day to day life. Imagine that your dress has a character? A character, which you
can choose, customise, it can be a cartoon character or kind of personality. There could be various character interactive dresses, which respond in sound
when you touch them. It detects your gesture, and gives a sound which is equivalent to human response for the same act. Mind you, we are looking for
witty, naughty fun answers, fun characters, since idea is of witty fun apparels.
What exactly are these fun techno apparels?
These apparels respond to your touch. The response is generally different sonic expressions like “ouch”
if you pinch them, or hold too tightly; “grrrr” if you pat hard, and “ummm” if you gently caress. Also, if
the person is idle for too long, it will express boredom by a very small dialogue like “boring!”
These responses will be customised for each t-shirt according to the user preferences. Each t-shirt’s
response collection will be based on either a chosen human personality (e.g. Nerd, Flirty, Fashionista
etc.) or cartoon character, or TV/Movie/Sports/etc. personality. It is totally upon the wish of the user.
How do we plan to implement it?
We plan to implement this idea as a platform for every age group to customised their fun tech t-shirt.
We want to make it easy for everyone, as a DIY kit. The kit will contained of a pre-programmed
modified Lilypad Aurdino with some soft switches to be placed inside of a t-shirt before wearing, and
they can customise it as many times as they want. Each day can be a new character, with new moods.

6. IMPLEMENTATION METHODOLOGY:
The implementation is largely applicable to all our ideas we want to pursue in this internship period. It is not the plan for the selected project(s), but more
like a methodology or approach that we currently think is apt for the work. This methodology will allow us to achieve a final prototype ready to be
fabricated by the end of the internship period.
DATE WORK PROGRESS
12th
April 2013 Preliminary discussion with Erin and Kate regarding the concept, design and implementation methodology
By 21st
April 2013 1) Prototype of the device using Bluetooth headset or some recording device for 1st level evaluation
2) Testing the prototype: volunteer(s) including Mani and Devyani, will use it for sometimes, probably a few days and tell their
experience, their issues with the existing prototype.
3) Simultaneously, brief primary and secondary research and analysis on :
a. Why people talk to themselves: Identifying the need/cause.
b. How conversations or articulated thoughts help in self-awareness or self-reflection.
c. The quantity, the content and timing of self-talk sessions in an average person's life
d. How many people feel the record their self-talk sessions and what is the intensity of this feeling
Before the end of April 2013 Analysis of the first prototype and implementation of second series of prototypes with the required amendments.
By 10th
May 2013 First Refined Prototype Complete
By 20th
May 2013 Refinement phase (which includes testing and analysis of the previous prototypes in actual scenarios).
By end of May 2013 Selection of the final prototype and starting to work on the actual fabrication, or a suggested fabrication method/proposal.

7. PROBLEM AREAS
As we are from diverse backgrounds, currently pursuing design, especially new to wearable technology and media arts/design, we would like to reflect and
need your guidance/attention on the following problem areas.
 The approach, understanding and concept building; skill to validate an idea in the domain of (interactive) wearables.
 To understand interaction design in context of wearables.
 Successful research methodology that can be adopted in this domain to validate and test our ideas.
 To understand how wearables interact with human body; any existing thesis/research/dissertation on this subject.